Songs about or heavily featuring opiate drugs?

[Marley23]

What’s that Nirvana song, pravnik?

[fisha]

Voodoo-Godsmack
Hurt-NIN as mentioned, but better when Johnny Cash did it.
Not an addict-Fiona Apple
Hotel California-Eagles

[flodnak]

Johnny B by The Hooters is either about heroin addiction or a destructive love affair, depending on how you read it. Personally, I vote heroin addiction.

[Ike_Witt]

God Smack by Alice in Chains.
Sludge Factory by Alice in Chains.

[BaneSidhe]

@OpalCat

by Laid Back

I think that the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” is about heroine, isn’t it?

Yes. According to Anthony Kiedis, the title refers to him buying dope under a bridge in a pretty bad neighborhood and his feelings about living in LA. Good song too.

[Marley23]

@adam yax

God Smack by Alice in Chains.
Sludge Factory by Alice in Chains.

And almost every other song Layne Staley wrote. Hate to Feel is one of the more blatant ones.

[MrDibble]

Golden Brown - The Stranglers
*Mutiny (In Heaven) *- The Birthday Party

[BrainGlutton]

Coleridge supposedly wrote “Kubla Khan” under the influence of the real Milk of Paradise!

[want2know]

Cold Turkey by John Lennon

Desire by U2 mentions the “needle and spoon”.

Rehab by Amy Winehouse

[Will_Repair]

Jones Coming Down - The Last Poets
Me and Mrs. Jones - Billy Paul

…

[Bambi_Hassenpfeffer]

@Freudian Slit

There She Goes, by the Las.

And covered by Contemporary Christian group Sixpence None The Richer.

As for opiate songs, the entire Aimee Mann album Lost In Space is about the cycle of addiction, recovery, relapse, and readdiction. It’s not hopeful nor uplifting, but it’s one of my favorites.

[Miss_Purl_McKnittington]

Momma by Rasputina.

“Momma was an opium smoker / She’d light it with a red hot poker / She’d never take a bath / We would ask her, she’d just laugh / Because our momma was an opium smoker”

[Geek_Mecha]

@Will Repair

Me and Mrs. Jones - Billy Paul

I don’t buy this. How do you explain these lyrics?

We meet ev’ry day at the same cafe,
Six-thirty I know she’ll be there,
Holding hands, making all kinds of plans
While the jukebox plays our favorite song.

We gotta be extra careful that we don’t build our hopes too high
Cause she’s got her own obligations and so do I
I’ve only ever heard one claim that the song was about drugs, and that was because they interpreted the Mrs. Jones to be reference to “jonesin’”, slang for craving drugs. That’s pretty weak. Using such leaps, any song could become a drug song.

Additionally:

Billy’s fourth album was designed to show him off as “an all-round entertainer.” In fact, it was called 360 Degrees of Billy Paul. Among the tracks was a tune that Gamble and Huff had helped write – a soul ballad about the touchy theme of adultery.

“I knew that, ‘Me and Mrs. Jones’ would be a hit even before it was released,” said Billy. “It’s a song that everybody can relate to.”

Not everyone agreed with that philosophy – in fact, a number of stations refused to play the record because it discussed an “immoral” theme without condemning it. Regardless, “Me and Mrs. Jones” became one of the largest-selling singles of the year, with sales topping four and a half million copies.

[pravnik]

@Marley23

What’s that Nirvana song, pravnik?

Sorry, writer-nerd joke. Passim, Latin for “throughout,” used in footnotes, annotations, indices and the like for something that appears so frequently in the work or work cited that it would be burdensome to list each occurence individually (e.g., if the Fifth Amendment is discussed on nearly every page, the citations page would read "U.S. Constitution, Fifth Amendment, passim).

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

Stranglers - Don’t Bring Harry

[Labdad]

Minnie the Moocher by Cab Calloway:

“Now, she messed around with a bloke named Smoky,
She loved him though he was cokey.
He took her down to Chinatown,
He showed her how to kick the gong around.”

(“kicking the gong around” was slang for smoking opium)

[Tool_of_the_Conspiracy]

@fisha

Not an addict-Fiona Apple

That was by a one-hit-wonder, K’s Choice. I don’t know the song well, but wasn’t it about love addiction, like “Junkie” by Poe?

[Bridget_Burke]

John Nova Lomax is Music Editor at The Houston Press. Here’s his take on Codeine and Houston Music, back in 2005.

On Sunday, April 17, the centerpiece story in the Arts and Entertainment section of The New York Times was a story about how, via the Slim Thug/Mike Jones/Paul Wall hit single “Still Tippin’,” Houston’s homegrown screw music was poised to take over the hip-hop nation. Screw – the slowed-down hip-hop invented by DJ Screw as music for people to enjoy while high on codeine cough syrup – was presented as something new, weird and uniquely Houstonian.

All of which it indubitably is – at least for hip-hop. But it’s mostly forgotten today that Screw was really the second Houston codeine aficionado to revolutionize a local scene. Back in the late '60s and early '70s, Townes Van Zandt turned Houston’s folk and country/Americana music on its head, thanks in no small part to his appreciation for the drug that is today called lean.

I told former Houstonian and Texas songwriting legend Guy Clark about screw music – which he had never heard of – and here is what he had to say: “Some things never change. You can always count on Houston’s codeine heads.”

[mswas]

@Darth Nader

mswas, you could have added so many more of Skinny Puppy’s songs…Harsh Stone White or Love in Vein, etc, etc…

What is it about great talent and heroin overdoses? RIP Dwane.

I think it’s a certain type of great talent. They tend to be the more morose sort.

And yes, there are quite a few Puppy songs with heroin references.

[T_SQUARE]

@Labdad

Minnie the Moocher by Cab Calloway:

“Now, she messed around with a bloke named Smoky,
She loved him though he was cokey.
He took her down to Chinatown,
He showed her how to kick the gong around.”

(“kicking the gong around” was slang for smoking opium)

And the dream about the King of Sweden, was of course, a pipe dream. I was really surprised to hear the song performed at the half time of a bowl game last year. I wonder how many people know it’s not really family friendly?